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REVIEWS Re Making 110 REVIEWS Re Making Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski, eds. The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Commentary on Poetry in English. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017. xliii + 340pp. The implicit question to be answered by any book review is, “did it have to be published?” In the retrospect of fifty years, few works of scholarship will stand the interrogation. In the case of this reprinting of a 1967 compilation by Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski of “essential articles on contemporary Canadian poetry in English”—the original subtitle—the answer cannot be straightforward. The original publication was a milestone in the emergence of Canadian modernist criticism. Without it, progress in that field would have been slowed and differently apportioned. It needed to be published then, and the book needs to this day to be widely available to students of Canadian literature, although it is now itself a historical document rather than an innovative or even accurate accounting of our poetry’s documentary history. The problem is, it is widely available, in a large number of North American university libraries across Canada and the United States, and no doubt in hundreds of public libraries not as amenable to quick online survey. As the present re-release is only very slightly altered from the original publication, its chief merit will lie in its new availability as an e-book. While The Making deserves the new readers who might be drawn to that format, there is no work for the reviewer in noticing the mere fact. Instead, the time seems ripe for a retrospective comment on The Making in its original form, preserved intact here, and for brief reflection on new short texts by Michael Gnarowski and Collett Tracey serving to bookend in this re- release the preserved pages of the original Ryerson book. Critics of my generation might have shared the excitement with which I discovered the book’s contents during graduate studies supervised by Dudek at McGill University in the early 1980s. Dudek did not send me to the book as to some bible; in fact I don’t recall him recommending the book at all, a reticence which was typical of his self-effacing attitude to his own critical works. It was here that I first encountered A.J.M. Smith’s early essays and their tantalizing reference, at the end of “Contemporary Poetry,” to the “Aesthetes,” and it was here that I first read of the tensions between Preview and First Statement little magazines. A discussion 111 opened before me in this book’s pages that I have been trying to join ever since, and it’s impossible to imagine what my thinking or pursuits might have been if the book had not been made. To this day, when so much energy is spent making the literary record available digitally, few of this book’s contents can be found online. Of course that makes a strong argument for the book’s digitization by McGill-Queen’s: every curious student of Canadian literature needs to encounter The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada. Though it is not promoted as a fiftieth anniversary edition, fifty years have indeed passed since the book’s publication by the Ryerson Press. That includes fifty years of scholarship on Canadian modernist poetry, of course, much of which has served to wear down and in some cases to leave obsolete the narratives that The Making wished to impose on Canadian literary history. Professor Gnarowski’s decision (or the press’s?) to make no alterations whatsoever to the original book, which runs perfectly and even quaintly intact here from page xliii to page 303, in luminously clear replications of the original pages, was the editorial decision of moment in this new reprinting. Gnarowski notes with pride the “special care” that was “taken not to disturb the integrity of the page order and citations” (xii). To that preserved core he adds a brief editor’s note, a “Personal Essai in the Unwritten History of Modern Canadian Poetry,” and three appendices, while Professor Collett Tracey contributes a short foreword that states The Making’s wide and persistent influence. I’ll say more of these new materials later, for they will have to stand as the chief justification for the book’s reprinting. This is not to minimize the persistent value of the original section headnotes: large portions of these are durable scholarship, and if their narratives are now familiar to specialists they remain welcoming and exciting to new readers of Canadian modernist poetry. They have, inevitably, their dated arguments: A.J.M. Smith’s division of Canadian poetry into “cosmopolitan” and “native” schools in The Book of Canadian Poetry in 1943 is too audible behind the closing lines of the headnote to chapter VI, “Points of View” (156). There are occasional acts of misreading, too, as when Lorne Pierce’s quite subtle demand for “profound and courageous reasoning and selection” in Canadian cosmopolitan responses to the international arts is reduced by the editors to an attitude that simply “turns its face against vigorous currents of influence from abroad” (113-14). None of these minor faults makes me hesitate to send students to the headnotes, the virtues of which are elsewhere so apparent and relevant. Consider the facility with which the 112 headnote to “New Critical Currents” casts light on three persistent issues for today’s scholars: the relation between politics and poetry in the forties, the upsurge in poets following academic careers, and the ambiguous place of E.J. Pratt in relation to modernism (85). Equally striking is the headnote to the sub-section “Poetry Finds a Public,” with an insightful rendition of the transition at mid-century from a “minority culture of embattled intellectuals” to a younger generation ready to exploit new media in the wider dissemination of their works and, increasingly, of their public personas. Although I go on now to chart the book’s inadequacies for the present-day reader, there is no doubt of The Making’s value as an “essential” document in the history of our criticism. The original Making fulfilled an agenda that is all the clearer now that it is presented to us as an historical artefact, with a faux-Art Deco font and stark colouration defining the nostalgically designed cover. As a first observation, the misogyny of that agenda was severe even for the times in which it was compiled. The representation of women’s voices in the volume is astonishingly slight: P.K. Page’s outraged letter of eight lines to the editors of Northern Review following the controversy over John’s Sutherland brutal review of Robert Finch’s Poems and an outstanding piece of Globe and Mail literary journalism by Joan Finnigan (six pages) make up the whole of it. We hear Dorothy Livesay’s punchy critical voice nowhere (though we do hear her praised by Desmond Pacey in 1954 for the “more specifically feminine” qualities of her “later poetry” [164]), nor those of Anne Marriott, Miriam Waddington, Phyllis Webb, and Jay Macpherson. With the work of Marilyn Rose, Di Brandt, Barbara Godard, Candida Rifkind, Dean Irvine and others having made so plain the crucial roles fulfilled by women in Canadian modernism’s emergence and consolidation, it is self-evident that The Making could not be newly published in this form today. One defence Gnarowski lays down for his having left the original selection intact is that “The documents of their time remain the documents of their time” (xi), but that sword cuts both ways if a publication seeks relevance and a press seeks sales in our time. The deeper agenda of The Making may be less immediately visible to many of today’s readers. This was the editors’ determination to present a narrative and documentary record of Canadian poetic history that privileged the lineage descending from the Montreal little magazine First Statement, through its editors, contributors, commentators, and heirs, at the expense of other literary institutions of the period, including rival little magazines such as Preview and literary movements and tastes with which Dudek differed, such as the Montreal poets of the twenties and thirties 113 and the mythopoeic impulse of poetry in the 1950s. Despite Gnarowski’s recalling in the “personal essai” that he and Dudek “recognized very quickly that there would be competing elements and competing points of view” in the book (xviii), The Making in fact embraces little dissent.1 The triumph of First Statement is pursued on two tacks: first, the selection of documents foregrounds wherever possible the works of Dudek, Irving Layton, and Raymond Souster, the First Statement cohort, whether as authors of criticism and polemic or as subjects of criticism by others; and second, that same selection enshrines John Sutherland, First Statement’s editor, as the titan of modernist poetry in Canada, even though Dudek had broken with Sutherland in the course of the 1950s over the latter’s increasingly conservative cultural politics. In the literary history The Making sought to shape, the fate of those who in one way or another opposed First Statement and its projects is relegation to the second tier of modernist significance. Smith and F.R. Scott are almost wholly sequestered in an early subsection called “The Initiators,” in company with “The Precursors” (Arthur Stringer, John Murray Gibbon, and Frank Oliver Call), in a chapter entitled “The Beginnings of the Modern School.” These titles clearly stamp Smith and Scott with tentativeness and an inability to carry the modernist project past the initiatory stages. The four documents they are allowed to contribute here total eleven pages, with Leo Kennedy’s important Canadian Mercury article “The Future of Canadian Literature” granted a further four.
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